Be concise – check out five.sentenc.es.
Be organised – try inbox zero.
Place things you need actioned at the beginning of emails NOT at the end.
If you include questions, number them in order of importance.
One day a week DO NOT check your email – give yourself a break and return to your inbox refreshed; ready to tackle the latest deluge.
1. Get out and about
What I enjoy most about the weekend is the chance to get out and about in to a non-school environment. This could be as trivial as walking down the road to the local Costa Coffee for a flat white or to the local supermarket to get the groceries. Or it could be something more meaningful such as a short train journey into London to visit a museum or see a play. Whatever it is, I enjoy being able to spend time with my wife; to eat, drink, interact and enjoy myself – free from the day-to-day experience that is my working week. This does not mean that I am completely switched off though. On the contrary, It is out there, in the real world that many of the ideas I have for teaching exercises reveal themselves. You see, if all you walk and talk all week is education with other educators, eventually the conversation becomes stagnant and new ideas dry up. My best ideas come to me usually when I’m nowhere near school; out there, in the real world.
2. Read the newspaper
During the week I am essentially locked in an education bubble. Sunday morning is catch up time. I need to know what is going on in the world, as both an English and Media Studies teacher, news has a significant impact on my teaching. I prefer to read the news on a Sunday as not only are the “really” important stories reflected on and pulled apart but being the weekend I feel I have the time to truly immerse myself into reading the news. I don’t buy a newspaper however. Instead, I read the Observer online via http://guardian.gyford.com. If you have not experienced either the Guardian or Observer newspaper in this way then I suggest that you give it a go. I feel that it offers the perfect balance between an online and paper based reading experience. And, while I don’t own one I am certain that it would work really well on the iPad.
3. Tidy up loose ends
On a Sunday evening I look through my work inbox and todo list and spend 60 minutes clearing as much as possible before Monday. I try to do something similar on a Friday afternoon before I leave work but there are often bits and pieces that just don’t get done. It could be the case that an email needs to be replied to; a handful of assignments need to be marked; a request for some data or other information needs to be submitted. Or it could be the case that the last few days may have simply been very busy and I have a backlog of emails that either need to be archived or deleted. Once the 60 minutes is up, anything that remains in my inbox or todo list is usually too large a task to be completed on a Sunday evening; requires input from a colleague; or I don’t have all the information to hand. This process has become a ritual and helps to ensure that I return to work on Monday morning free of clutter and ready for the challenges ahead.
This is a brief update on what’s happening with #edjournal.
If you have written or are writing an article for submission, we have decided to go with the Harvard System of Referencing.
A web based home for the journal is currently under construction. This will include clear direction on how to submit articles, rules for submission and editing and also host the published journal when it is ready.
In the meantime if you added an article title or idea to the following document, now is the time to submit your article for peer review.
While the website is not yet up and running you can submit your article to one of the following email addresses:
We have opted to use Google docs to host and peer review the articles. Once we have enough articles submitted we will begin the peer review process. More details about this will follow shortly.
Thanks to Andy Kemp (@andykemp) and Peter Richardson (@primarypete_) who have already submitted their articles.
So, if your article or book review is ready please send it in to one of us.
This is the first in a series of four posts about my experiences of using Google docs with my Year 10 Media Studies students, over the course of the last academic year. Each post will cover a specific topic:
Part 1: Signing Up (or a lesson in the drawbacks of being impulsive)
Signing up should have been easy, right? Wrong? At least, that is if you’re a bit impulsive like me and don’t always think things through or test things first.
Let’s begin with a short history lesson: When I joined my school over seven years ago, all students were issued with a school email account. Each year the accounts of one or more year groups would be shut down due to misuse. Rather than teaching the students about email etiquette and online responsibility the powers that be chose to go for the classic “punish them all rather than just the few” approach. For a time the accounts were shut down altogether. Now, fast forward to January 2010. What many students at my school don’t realise is that each they have a working school email account. The relevance of this little history lesson will become clear a few paragraphs later.
So, why Google docs?
I’ll let Google answer that one for me! See pic:
Every point used by Google to promote their cloud based editing suite is valuable but it has always been points 2 and 4 that have enticed me the most as an educator. Before I decided to use docs with my students I had made use of it sharing and editing documents with literally a handful of colleagues to hammer out ideas and plan projects. I could see quite clearly, the value that it would offer a class of students. Student’s could submit their homework online, they could work collaboratively together in real time, I could mark and edit their work as they went along – great for differentiation and there is no need to be carrying a pocketful of memory sticks around that can be easily lost. Awesome!
With all of this is mind however, when I took my class off to the computer room with the intention of getting them started with Google docs I had not fully thought it through. I can be quite impulsive at times and a little reactionary. I had read the weekend before about some great work produced by students collaboratively on Google docs and was feeling inspired. I had just started a new unit with my class, beginning with a research project. I felt that utilising the collaborative nature and real time editing features of Google docs would be the perfect way for my students to write up and present their research. So, I decided to go for it without considering one very important aspect of the whole process: signing up and email account verification!
The students were typically enthusiastic about using the computers and were logged on before I could finish issuing instructions. I shared the URL they need and demonstrated how to sign up for a Google account. When my students asked: “what email address should we use, sir?” I simply replied “your own” without thinking. This was a huge mistake because web-based email (Hotmail, Yahoo, Google etc) is blocked in my school. Why was this a problem? Well, it’s not at first. Google docs signs you in automatically when you first sign up and you can start editing documents straight away. “Good times!” However, should you log out or wish to share your newly created document with anyone then you must verify your account. How is this achieved? By sending you an email, which includes a link that you must click on. The first activity I had planned was a collaborative one. My intention being to wow them with the possibilities that Google Docs offers but we were literally blocked at the first hurdle as the students I had selected to create and share documents with their peers were asked to verify their accounts. Could they access their email? No!
This is where the history lesson from earlier becomes relevant. There is considerable debate within educational communities about the value of knowledge. But I am here to advocate that “knowledge is power”. It is the knowledge rooted in the back of my mind that 1. The students’ school email accounts work and 2. Google allows you to re-associate an account to another email that saved the day for me and my students. A teacher without this knowledge, in a school that does not give its students personal email accounts would have had to give up at this point. So the next bit of this post explains how to re-associate a Google account to a different email address.
I showed each student how to access their Google account. As you can see in the image above underneath their “Email address” there is an edit option. This allows you to change the email address that is associated with the account. By getting each of my students to work through this process, associating their Google accounts with their school email addresses I was able to get the lesson back on track. They each received an email in their school email accounts asking them to verify their Google accounts. As soon as this was done they could log back into Google docs, share documents with each other and begin collaborating.
There was not as much time to work through the activity (a simple editing task) that I had set for them but many of the students could see how useful Google docs could be. I was able to get a member of each research team to create a document (presentation) to work into. The following lesson the students began to collaborate, adding to their presentation. But on this I will say no more as this is the topic of the next post in the series.
Suffice to say, while the lesson did not go as planned I learned a lot and knew exactly how I would go about this process with other classes.
So what follows is a best practice guide to signing your students up to use Google docs:
To conclude this first post about my experiences of using Google docs with my students, I would also recommend that you find a colleague to use Google docs with before you use it with your students. This was a great help to me as it allowed me to have a full understanding of how to create and share documents so that I could get my students creating and collaborating immediately. It is also useful to get one student to sign up on a student machine so that you can investigate any potential pitfalls. If your school is like mine, the student machines are set up differently to staff laptops. Had the process of signing up been more smooth my students would have walked away from the lesson with a collaborative document that they had both edited. In the end this was only partially achieved with this class but worked successfully with subsequent classes.
Next time: Collaboration.
Effective teaching and learning is about being present; being in the moment. Too often I am aware of teachers who are not being in the moment.
When you are teaching please don’t:
These actions and others like them send one simple message to your students: That you don’t care. Perhaps the reason you don’t care is because you are not being in the moment, you are elsewhere. The knock on effect of this is probably poor behaviour from your students, they are now, not in the moment either because they don’t want to be and they are certainly not learning.
If this is hitting home and you want to reinvigorate the teaching and learning in your classroom, then begin by turning off your email for a day. Forget about what you are doing next lesson or tomorrow. Get up from your desk and step away from the white board. For the whole day, lesson by lesson, inside your classroom focus on the here and now. Your students will appreciate the attention, real learning will take place and you will feel so much better for freeing yourself of other matters, particularly your email inbox.
Remember “you are here now”!
Image “you are here now” by farouche and available to buy on etsy.